A blog from the Khan Academy Computing team. We'll post on what we've released, what we're working on, and what we learn as we go along.

Friday, November 15, 2013

Join us for Hour of Code on Khan Academy!

Hour of Code is an initiative to get students (ages 6-106!) to spend an hour learning how to code, as part of national CS Education Week, December 9-15. There are nearly 2 million students signed up already and 12,000 events scheduled from 144 countries.

At Khan Academy, we’re obviously pretty excited about this initiative, since we believe that all students should start learning computational thinking and programming at an early age, even if that’s not what they ultimately do in life. Unfortunately, that’s not yet a part of the K-12 Common Core curriculum, so many teachers don’t get the chance to expose their students to programming. Thanks to the Hour of Code initiative, we hope they can find the time - and that some students will keep going afterwards once they’ve realized how cool programming can be.

Our full programming curriculum takes much longer than an hour to complete, so we’ve curated a subset of the first tutorial to come up with a special Hour of Code mini curriculum. Of course, we firmly believe in self-paced learning at Khan, so we encourage teachers to give students more than an hour and to not make them feel rushed.

If you’re a teacher, you can read our Hour of Code teacher’s kit here. You don’t even need to be a classroom teacher - you can be a parent doing it with your kids, an employee doing it with your colleagues, a Meetup organizer doing it with your members, etc. As long as you’re passionate about teaching the world to code, you can join in. Remember to register your event on CSEdWeek so that you can be eligible for prizes and get access to more resources, and spread the word to everyone around you.